@ Pippin - I don't see the obsession with temperature. Temperature is not the critical thing here, in fact, describing the temperature of these very tiny, very transient plasmas is probably a pretty vague thing. The critical thing is energy. I think, in the press releases, they talk about temperature because that is something the public can kind of relate to. They can't relate to TeV.

If the "micro"(for lack of a better term) temperature of a single collision is equal to 100,000x the sun, then I am an idiot and some of the posters will hunt me down and beat me with sticks.
If the ambient temperature due to the cumulative energy release of previous collisions is 100,000x the sun while collisions are still occurring then CERN is misrepresenting the safety of their experiments to the public.